Yzma's Lair

This one goes way back to 1996. (Yikes, a decade, it doesn’t seem that long ago.) I was asked by the director Roger Allers to do some development work on an epic Inca project he was developing at Disney. The working title for the project was, Children Of The Sun, which then was changed to Children In The Sun, Kingdom In The Sun, and lastly, The Emperor’s New Groove.

I worked on Children Of The Sun through its many reiterations, but after about a year of development the project was torn down and rebuilt with new directors and a new comedy direction. At which point I was no longer working on that project.

This was supposed to be Yzma’s lair! I based my imagedry on Inca architecture and sculpture. Through my research I had also learned that the Inca mummified their dead, but they didn’t have catacombs on the scale of Europeans. So I imagined a giant chasm of corpses as a dungeon for Supai (the imprisoned darkenss). I put it all together with the iron grate with an Inca design holding back the darkness. You can see the darkness creeping out of it's prison cell to snuff out a candle light. In this dark and forboding place, Yzma was to conspire with Supai against the Sun Kingdom.

The image was drawn with graphite on Ledger paper.

VIGNALI STUDIO NOW IN 3D!

The other day my daughters were watching Shrek 3D. They were wearing those red and blue 3D glasses, and it gave me an idea. I took one of my old drawings in Photoshop and made it 3D. If you have some of those red and blue 3D glasses at home, you might want to have a look at my 3D mouse and see if it's working for you.

If you decide to make a 3D drawing for yourself, let me know in the comments section and I'll go and check out your 3D drawing. Have fun!

Mermaid

Here's one from a few years back.

I was asked to come up with a believable mermaid design for a major motion picture. I can't remember what the title was, but I liked the design and the drawing and thought it would be worth posting.

I believe the drawing was done on vellum and prismapencil.

Princess Kida from ATLANTIS

This drawing was done back in 1997 when I was doing early development work for Disney’s Atlantis.

At one point, the princess was going to die, but be brought back to life by the mysterious crystal around her neck. In a moment of movie magic she is resurrected, and the ancient city is also brought back to life.

This image was done before the characters were finalized so my princess design is not “on model,” but aside from that, the final version stayed fairly faithful to my initial concept design. You know: green glow, white light, and weightless-lifeless scantly clad girl floating in a tube of light.

If you are wondering how I was able to capture that charming, translucency and variation in the areas of color…that’s because this image was done with magic marker. I wasn’t working in Photoshop much back then, so this image was done “old school.” It’s funny to look at now, with that sort of crude blending and uneven variations in color that give it that charming artsy look. Believe me, it wasn't intentional...it was the state of the art of a bygone era.

Here is where the all the anatomy drawings pay off directly.

I believe this drawing was reproduced in the Atlantis book, but was a small reproduction.

Another Figure Drawing

This image was drawn with a China Marker on tracing paper. Once I scanned it, I superimposed the image over a textured background to give it a more "artsy" look. The image was drawn in five minutes.